Other Speakers

This panel considers how the choreography of disability is a political project that is concerned with the shaping and transformation of movement. This panel aims to rethink from the perspective of disability how art history and aesthetic practice adjudicate questions of representation, embodiment, movement, and sense perception. To do so the panel places into conversation two sets of emerging discourses and practices: the first is disability aesthetics, which according to disability theorist Tobin Siebers seeks to “establish disability as a critical framework that questions the presuppositions underlying definitions of aesthetic production and appreciation” by emphasizing “the presence of different bodies and minds in the tradition of aesthetic representation.”

The second concerns a concept that performance theorist Andre Lepecki has termed “choreopolitics,” a term that suggests how new critical and aesthetic work addressing the forms of violence and dispossession that saturate our contemporary political moment can be thrown into relief by attending to how movement plays into the way power orders, arranges, impedes, and allows bodies to circulate. By rethinking disability aesthetics choreopolitically, the panel aims to develop new ways of studying the politics and aesthetics of bodily movement both historically and in the contemporary moment.